Discrimination and ordinal judgments of temporal durations at 3 months

This study presents the first evidence that 3-month-old infants success in a timing matching task and in an ordinal timing task, when numerical information is controlled. Three-month-old infants discriminated brief temporal durations that differed by a 1:3 ratio, relying solely on temporal information. Moreover, at 3 months of age infants were able to discriminate between monotonic and non-monotonic time-based series, when numerical and temporal information were inconsistent. These findings strengthen the hypothesis that a magnitude representational system for temporal quantities is operating very early in the ontogenetic development.

► An open issue is to understand the ontogenetic origins of time competences.
► Here we investigated timing competences to process temporal information in very early infancy, testing whether either temporal discrimination or temporal ordinal judgments are functional at 3 months.
► Our results showed that 3-month-old infants success in a timing matching task and in an ordinal timing task, when numerical information are controlled.
► These results strengthens the hypothesis of a system for the representations of time, involving ordinal processing, functional in early infancy.